Watch: Code Red Swell Hits Lake Superior!

Come, come chase a Code Red swell with Puerto Rico’s Dylan Graves to… Minnesota! A fabulous state which is home to the largest diaspora of Somalis east of Africa and backs onto the Greatest Lake of ’em all, Lake Superior.

(Ain’t no fresh-water lake in the world as big as Lake Superior.)

You remember Dylan, yeah? He’s mid-thirties now but he used to be on the Quiksilver roster, the clean-looking Young Gun playing cute foil to the hoary champ Kelly Slater. Tween Young Gun and now (Old Bum?), Dylan took on the WQS (ain’t much success) before settling into that ever-warm freesurfing zone.

(Once when I interviewed Dylan, he said he liked to swish his long hair around women’s breasts, sometimes head-butts his friends when he’s boozed, and likes it “when girls aren’t afraid to let some dirty shit come out. I just like it when they say fuck.”)

Editor’s update: Dylan just texted to ask me if I had proof of the interview and to remind me that “a little more work might be required than a 10-year-old interview. Thanks for an unnecessary chat with the mrs. Shitty journalism for the sake of making a name for urself. Who wins?”

He’s right, of course, although the ol never-said-it argument rarely works and only serves to shrink the proprietor in front of his audience.

Anyway,

In this thirteen-minute “short feature”, Dylan exits the tropics to fly to the state of Minnesota to surfs a network of waves one local surfer points out is a “rare phenomenon” of rocky points, reefs and beachbreaks.

Dylan says the cold water feels like being hit by a neuralyzer, the device used in the Will Smith vehicle, Men in Black.

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Re-Watch: A new cut of Chippa Wilson tearing hell on 20 softboards!

Twenty soft boards, twenty tricks. This time around, we've identified the boards as they appear in the film…

One month, or thereabouts, ago, BeachGrit joined with Chris “Chippa” Wilson for a very summer challenge: nail twenty tricks on twenty different softboards over the course of one morning.

Did you watch when it came out the first time?

On surfboards one would hardly consider able to fly, Chippa nailed shuv-its, 540s frontside and backside and a 1440, proving anything is possible on these friendly beasts.

What was missing, in the first version, was any sort of ID on the boards as they appeared. You’d see a backside 540 and you wouldn’t know if Chip was on a Drag, a Softlite or an MF. In this version, the name of each board appears on the screen.

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Watch Filipe Toledo in “I went to Hawaii and all I got was a lousy almost-ten at Pipe!”

A four-minute slice of world number three Filipe Toledo's North Shore campaign…

It isn’t a secret that BeachGrit is making a longish-form film that documents Filipe Toledo’s quest, and it is a quest in the sense that it’s a long and arduous search for something, to unlock the secrets of heavy waves.

Yesterday, the surf filmmaker who defined the nineties, Taylor Steele, announced he’d be gradually uploading his entire catalogue onto his YouTube channel, The Momentum Files.

So far, there’s an intro to the channel, Kelly Slater in Momentum II and, I think my all-time favourite Taylor Steele part, Rob Machado in Focus, released a quarter of a century ago.

Immediate thought: put ’em in the right waves and long, narrow and curved surfboards…work.

Second thought: Is Rob in black face/body?

Simpler times!

Watch!

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Yago Dora, pictured here cool as anything at Pipeline, is the son of former pro surfer and coach to world champ Adriano De Souza, Leandro Dora. He earned the nickname goat for his similarity to the animal first domesticated by humans many thousands of years ago.

Watch: Yago Dora in “Hawaii’s the 50th state? I thought it was a suburb of Guam!”

Brazilian jibber and tuber finds ramps and cabanas on his annual North Shore vacay…

Surfing, I think, is lucky to have the Brazilian Yago Dora in its stable. Yago, who is twenty-two years old and the current world number twenty-one, presents as a mix between Craig Anderson and Noa Deane wrapped up with a sort of Chippa Wilson-esque aptitude for x-rated frivolity above the lip.